Template talk:Prime Ministers of the United Kingdom
Of all the stupid things to have it all fucked up. TR, I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to change the colors. I tried very hard to follow a walkthrough on Wikimedia, but no dice. I was thinking red on white, like the English flag. Turtle Fan 21:13, July 9, 2010 (UTC) :I just stole from Wikipedia. When in doubt, cut and paste from the source code, like so. TR 21:17, July 9, 2010 (UTC) ::Is that all there is to it? Hmm. Then all we'd have to do is remove brackets and add ATL sections. Turtle Fan 21:44, July 9, 2010 (UTC) I really do wish we could have a red-and-white color scheme. This default is so milquetoast. Especially when you look at how cool the Soviet one looks. Turtle Fan 01:06, July 10, 2010 (UTC) :Let me see what I can do. I don't think red on white will work. White headerboxes look pretty shitty. White on red might be ok (or blue, for the matter). :It's worth pointing out that the default colors are not likely to wind up in the story templates, which might prevent some confusion (or not.) TR 01:17, July 10, 2010 (UTC) ::A white headerbox is also not likely to wind up in a story template. And while the default colors aren't the same as the FP box, as becomes clear when you look at them side by side as I just did, they do bear a passing resemblance. Turtle Fan 01:59, July 10, 2010 (UTC) :Well, maybe red on white isn't so shitty. TR 01:39, July 10, 2010 (UTC) ::No, I like it. In fact I move we use it for Monarchs of the UK as well. Turtle Fan 01:59, July 10, 2010 (UTC) For those templates where we'll have a few blues among a lot of blacks this one-name business really is a pretty elegant way of making things more user-friendly, to say nothing of easier on the eyes. Turtle Fan 14:00, July 11, 2010 (UTC) TWTPE I was just thinking, there's a pretty good chance TWTPE is going to get is own line after TBS comes out. Should be exciting! Turtle Fan 17:40, May 6, 2011 (UTC) I really wish we had some idea of where the premiereship lies after CdE. It's not Cartland, of course, despite heavy foreshadowing. Is the office vacant vacant? I think not. The junta does enjoy the Crown's confidence, and legally that can make someone a PM, especially coming on the heels of Wilson holding office despite not being an MP. George isn't heading the government himself, so there's a premier out there somewhere. Turtle Fan (talk) 01:55, September 27, 2012 (UTC) :Wavell would be the obvious choice but for the fact that HT never said that he was the premier. Based on the very broad hints, I have the sense that it's diffuse power-sharing plan, but I can't really prove it. TR (talk) 03:06, September 27, 2012 (UTC) Nonconsecutive Terms When we made this last year I suggested, and you all went along with the idea, that each OTL PM be named only once. I now feel that we should have PMs who headed non-consecutive governments appear as often as they assumed the office (though not when they headed governments in consecutive Parliaments: for instance, Blair held the premiership in three successive sessions after leading Labour to three successive electoral victories, but will continue to appear only once). This is compatible with our other office templates--Cleveland appears twice on the POTUS template--and is more informative generally. Turtle Fan 19:11, June 13, 2011 (UTC) :Ok. TR 20:30, June 13, 2011 (UTC) The Next Entry I predict we're going to add Miliband in a few weeks. Cameron may well come out of the election with the largest party in the Commons, but the Lib Dems are going to get murdered and there just aren't going to be enough seats to the right of center to cobble together a majority coalition. Labour plus all the small parties to the left of center will not give him confidence if it comes to that, so Cameron's only options will be to step aside or insist on martyrdom, and if the latter, the left will oblige him. Then it's the weakest and ricketiest of minority governments with no opportunity to call a snap election to bolster support. That's going to suck for Britain. Even in the US, when we go with the equivalent of a minority government (Congressional majorities in opposition hands), we get the opportunity to reconsider the arrangement every other year. And we get an independent executive who's got not at all insignificant power even in the face of the most entrenched legislative obstructionism. Turtle Fan (talk) 21:33, April 22, 2015 (UTC) :I suspect you're right. TR (talk) 01:38, April 23, 2015 (UTC) ::One other possibility I've heard is that the SNP won't play ball with Labour (but that's looking less and less likely) and Miliband won't be able to form a government either. Then Labour ditches him in favor of a New Labour Blairite like Umunna, and they team up with the Tories (who will have hypothetically become more centrist since UKIP spoiler candidates sapped support from some of their most right-wing constituencies and sunk some of their right-wing MPs). The two major parties decide to go back to the days of the national coalitions of the 1930s so they can lock out the extreme parties and deny the balance of power to single-issue obsessives. ::I do think I'd prefer that to having NATO's number two government suddenly becoming even more paralyzed and dysfunctional than its number one government currently is. I'm not holding my breath, though. Turtle Fan (talk) 03:42, April 23, 2015 (UTC) So Cameron held on after all, and with an honest-to-God majority no less. But his second government will have fewer votes relative to the opposition than his first one did. Labour took it on the chin and now Miliband's gone. The Lib Dems were sunk. All the new small insurgent parties were disappointed except the Scots Nats. That party met with more success than they could have dreamed of (and I understand they even got a twenty-year-old elected!), but with a Tory majority they don't get to wield the balance of power, which is what they'd really wanted. So our next entry will have to wait a while. Not past 2020, most likely; Cameron's said he intends to step down as leader at the end of this parliament. (Probably a good bit before, actually, so the next leader can get their legs under them before the campaign starts.) It's not exactly unheard of for politicians to break promises like those. Turtle Fan (talk) 16:44, May 8, 2015 (UTC) :Yes, that was quite the surprise. Poor old Miliband. TR (talk) 17:29, May 8, 2015 (UTC) ::I felt worse for Clegg. If I were an Englishman I think I'd have voted Lib Dem. (If I were a Scotsman I'd have voted Labour to try to derail the SNP, not that it would have done much good.) They had a moderating effect on Tory policy while allowing Parliament to move away from Brown's policies, which the electorate had clearly rejected; and by proving that a coalition could work as well as a majority government, they made the Brits more comfortable with the idea of hung parliaments and thus opened the door for minor parties in the future (even if, surprisingly, they chose not to go that way this time). Clegg was pretty left of center before and I don't believe he was comfortable with the centrist tack he was forced to take this time, but joining the coalition in 2010 was right for many pragmatic reasons, and what did him in was, I believe, overestimating the pragmatism of his party members and underestimating the strength of their ideology. I will generally always err on the side of supporting politicians who are more interested in pragmatism than ideology. ::I never really warmed up to Miliband, he was just so goofy. I did catch a few speeches and interviews he gave during the campaign where he was quite impressive, but he was usually opposite batshit crazies like Russell Brand. Turtle Fan (talk) 00:29, May 10, 2015 (UTC) Brexit Have to keep an eye on the news, because while we didn't change the list last year, we will this year. Cameron promises he'll be gone by October if not sooner. Given the nature of his fall, I guess it will have to be Johnson or Gove. I do still like Johnson even though I think he's done an awful thing here. At least that jerk Osborne won't get it now; that's one bit of silver lining. Turtle Fan (talk) 11:20, June 24, 2016 (UTC) :Ah, I see Turtle Fan has added May to the list a few days ago with the comment that he didn't see the Queen refusing to appoint her. Consider: ::"What, I am not appointing a porn star as my Prime Minister! What's that? Oh never mind. ML4E (talk) 16:48, July 16, 2016 (UTC) ::Ha! I think I dimly remember hearing about the "other" May. Turtle Fan (talk) 17:10, July 16, 2016 (UTC) :::I can't say that I'd "heard" of her, but I did see the "Smack My Bitch Up" video whenever it first aired way back when. So I am somewhat familiar with her work, I guess. TR (talk) 17:52, July 16, 2016 (UTC) ::::I never had till now. Just checked it out. Wow. I'm somewhat sympathetic to those who say that censoring obscenity compromises artistic expression, but that . . . doesn't help their case. Turtle Fan (talk) 01:09, July 17, 2016 (UTC) 2018 I wonder if this is going to change soon, what with the Cabinet resignations. I doubt it, worse luck. May's so weak and useless, yet somehow she lurches on. Not that any of her likely successors within the party look any better. Neither does Corbyn. British politics seem stuck in a pretty shitty rut, with all these ineffective parasites too entrenched in positions of power to provide any option that leads to a really effective government any time soon. Of course, they all look like giants next to Old Man Pussy Grabber, don't they? Turtle Fan (talk) 15:55, July 11, 2018 (UTC) :Yeah, it's dispiriting on multiple levels. Germany is still managing not to be terrible, so there is that. TR (talk) 16:31, July 11, 2018 (UTC) ::Yeah, but Merkel's looking vulnerable since last year's election. Macron is the up-and-comer, and he and Merkel seem willing to pull in harness. (Apparently the Russian Foreign Minister recently admitted in a hot mic moment or something that Russia considers Macron the leader of the West.) Turtle Fan (talk) 21:23, July 11, 2018 (UTC) :::Hooray for hot mics. TR (talk) 22:55, July 11, 2018 (UTC) Well, we may be revisiting this one by year's end after all. TR (talk) 05:20, July 13, 2018 (UTC) She's Out! Two weeks from today till she resigns as Tory leader. Then she's caretaker PM till her party finds another asshat. Good riddance, you useless old cow. Now if only I could believe someone worthwhile were going to come along to replace her. Turtle Fan (talk) 18:03, May 24, 2019 (UTC) :Johnson seems poised to take the "who sucks worse?" challenge. TR (talk) 17:45, May 25, 2019 (UTC) ::Well, they did say that last time. Michael Hesseltine was supposed to have had it in the bag in '90, and if you go back through earlier Conservative leadership contests, the obvious choice rarely seems to make it. ::The nature of their leadership process does seem to favor underdogs on the grounds that having no friends is much less of a hindrance than having no enemies is a boon. So a low profile and an unknown background are big advantages, and Johnson has neither. ::He sure does suck, though! Turtle Fan (talk) 19:15, May 25, 2019 (UTC) I See TR Added Johnson This Brexit soap opera used to be so compelling. I was glued to my screen during the referendum results episode. Even the snap election episode had me on the edge of my seat, for all that it was an obvious ratings-grab and clearly wasn't actually going to resolve anything. But now? It's kind of reminding me of the last couple years of Downton Abbey. They're wedded to a formula, sticking to the status quo, afraid to shake things up, just hoping they'll get picked up for another season. I mean, look at how they wrote out the Theresa May character. She had to go, of course; the idea that she could still cling to power after so many fuck-ups was well past the point where I was willing to suspend disbelief. But they handled it so badly. Remember the episode where the House of Commons rejected the Withdrawal Agreement the first time? (The first of three, mind you--three in one spring. See, this is what I'm talking about.) The Jeremy Corbyn character tabled a motion of no confidence in May, and I really thought the show would be ballsy enough to have her fall then and there. But all the Tories who had just voted down her bill suddenly got back on sides and pretended to have confidence in her, even though they clearly did not--even though many of them had just voted against her in the intra-party confidence vote in the Christmas special! So she got to hang on and drag things out till the season finale, when she chose to quit for no clear reason. And worse, the writers neutered any drama this shake-up might have caused by giving the premiership to the Boris Johnson character, whom they'd been setting up as the PM-in-waiting since the snap election backfired. They never made it look like anything other than smooth sailing for him. Things got a little interesting when they brought in the Rory Stewart character as a sort of intriguing dark-horse challenger. He really seemed to be resonating with the viewers, but they wrote him out in the very next episode. Then they teased that the Michael Gove character was going to torment Johnson. That would have been much more entertaining. I never cared for Gove, but he and Johnson had unfinished business dating back to the aftermath of the David Cameron character's resignation. (And that's another thing: the writers wisely decided not to make Johnson PM back then, because putting a character who so clearly lends himself to comic relief in such a central role would have made the program too wacky. Lots of obvious, unoriginal jokes are about to become just irresistible now.) Instead Johnson trounced some bland nobody that the viewers couldn't have cared less about. The Jeremy Hunt character looked like a Mormon missionary and didn't even have enough personality to make hay out of the apparent DV call to Johnson's booty call's house. (Why did they even put that in the script if they weren't going to do anything with it? Domestic violence as a Chekov's gun? Pretty tasteless if you ask me.) Let's see, what else is going on. The Lib Dem leadership election just wrapped up--yes, why not have your B story be the exact same thing as your A story, but with even less tension and with nothing much at stake? (It might pay off if they do a general election next season, but I'm not holding my breath.) Then there's the Nigel Farage character's new storyline. For one thing, it's pretty clearly a retread. I mean, the Brexit Party? Come on. Obviously his old outfit with a new name that's way too on the nose. But he was such a magnificent villain in Season 1, and reintroducing him in the European elections episode was a great "Oh shit!" moment. But now what do they do with him? He sits in the way back of the European Parliament with that racist old lady and two dozen extras, heckling the place like Statler and Waldorf. Ooh, exciting! I don't know, I think at this point you might as well just cancel Brexit. It still has some entertainment value, but the writers really seem to have lost the plot. The storylines these days are contrived, repetitive, predictable, and mostly seem to depend on what are supposed to be great statesmen lacking basic, fundamental understanding of how politics, economics, and diplomacy work. The Brexiteer characters aren't even pretending there's going to be a happy ending anymore, and the whole thing is starting to feel like it's just more ammunition for what I've been saying for some time now: the Golden Age of TV drama is over. Turtle Fan (talk) 06:27, July 24, 2019 (UTC)